’Today, racial inequality of opportunity and outcome
in education is still the result of past generations of
explicit policy decreeing that white children were to have
better schools than non-white children, of the subsequent
exacerbation of poverty along racial lines, of the nations
failure to actively desegregate, and of the intersections
between opportunity denials in health and housing as well as
in education. But racially unequal educational opportunity
and outcome today also result from ordinary actions and
inaction by well-intentioned people ’ in part, within
schools and districts themselves...

Explicit resistance to opportunity for non-white
people today has been replaced by stated general commitments
to racially equal opportunity as a basic American value.
But’ such generic commitments are often trumped by
opposition to concrete efforts to equalize particular
opportunities for people of color.’
Excerpted from the Introduction (pages 11-12)

Why is it that a half-century after Brown vs. Board of
Education, the landmark, U.S. Supreme Court case mandating the
desegregation of the country's public schools ’with all
deliberate speed,’ the bulk of African-American children are
still forced to attend poorly-equipped, predominately-black,
inner-city schools where the dropout rate is around 50%? And why
do even those fortunate to be enrolled at a supposedly
integrated institution still find themselves cordoned off with
other kids of color in Special Ed classes or steered onto a
non-academic track?

These are the sorts of questions addressed by Professor Mica
Pollock in Because of Race: How Americans Debate Harm and
Opportunity in Our Schools. Pollock, who now teaches Education
at Harvard's Graduate School, became acutely aware of the
persistence of inequalities in educational opportunities while
working at the Office for Civil Rights during the Clinton
administration.
In that capacity, she heard hundreds of complaints from minority
parents about how their children were being discriminated
against in a variety of ways, ranging from being denied access
to basic resources to being discouraged to being unfairly
disciplined to being subject to subtle forms of de facto
segregation.

In trying to right the assorted wrongs, Professor Pollock
repeatedly encountered considerable resistance from school
administrators who had become quite adept at rationalizing the
difference between their servicing the needs of black and white
students, despite the fact that the Supreme Court had long since
declared such ’separate but equal’ accommodations
unconstitutional.
In clear and convincing language, the author exposes the primary
four fallacious arguments bureaucrats generally rely on to
maintain the status quo. And she subsequently offers several
concrete suggestions for how this society might arrive at true
equal educational opportunity.

A groundbreaking book which blows the cover off the country's
continued shameful color-coded patterns when it comes to access
to quality education.